Animal Well – beautifully wrought indie underground

Billy Basso; Bigmode; PC, PlayStation, Switch
A shimmering subterranean world reveals itself bit by bit to you, an amorphous blob, in this enchanting, intricate game

The dark aperture of a well has always been an alluring focus of human fascination. Giver of life-sustaining water, it is also seen as a portal to a warren of risky secrets; our fables are littered with wailing children whose curiosity got the better of them, consigned to an eternity of damp gazing up toward the distant, unreachable circle of light. Animal Well, an indie game seven years in the making, sends us down into one of these twilight labyrinths, a cave system of incessant dripping and darting creatures whose fur is tinged with luminescence. The goals are unstated but obvious: explore, map, emerge. It is a quest that soon becomes an obsession.

You play as an amorphous blob – hardly the most aspirational cipher – but what you lack in, say, limbs, you make up for in pluck and inventiveness. To begin with you can only bravely leap between rocks and platforms. But in time you gain new tools, gadgets and abilities that enable you to access previously unreachable passageways and tunnels. As you quest deeper into the cave system, your map fills in, inch by inch.